Tell Me About It: Wife needn't feel guilty if she gives up on cheater

Dear Carolyn: A year ago (and a year after my wedding), I found out that during the wedding planning, my spouse had an affair.

Dear Carolyn: A year ago (and a year after my wedding), I found out that during the wedding planning, my spouse had an affair.

Because we had been married a year and I loved him, I wanted to stay and work on the relationship.

Recently, I found out that he had been talking to another woman and told her he was divorced and living with his ex-wife in separate bedrooms. At that point, I packed my car and drove home from Colorado to Virginia, where I’m from.

He says he is sorry, that he has been in counseling and that he is never giving up. We have no kids, no mortgage, no shared assets — I’m 25 and he is 27 — and my entire relationship with him has been about him, not who I want to be.

Part of me feels as if I got a do-over to live my life the way I want to, but am I giving up too easily? I’m not sure I can look past the hurtful things he has done, but I don’t want to leave without trying everything.

— Anonymous

Dear Anonymous: I think it is important to do all you can to save a marriage. But that general advice rests on a presumption that there was intimacy in their relationship once, and therefore the goal is to restore it.

In your case, your two revelations — the affair while planning your wedding and the lie-infused extracurriculars while you were supposedly working on your marriage — suggest that there was never any intimacy to begin with. Instead, they suggest there was only the illusion of it, the illusion of a marriage, while your husband devoted his attention to serving his own needs.

Given all you know now, does that sound about right?

Maybe it doesn’t, or maybe you have your own reasons for “trying everything,” be it your conscience or your respect for the institution of marriage or your desire for a vaccine against future regrets. No one should talk you out of those.

Maybe, too, your husband is the rare exception who isn’t groveling just because he got caught and because he stands to lose his sturdy platform from which to indulge himself. Maybe he really is trying to recover from the ailment that is the sole cause of his taking shameless advantage of you.

By all means, wrestle with these possibilities.

Anyone who has been betrayed and insulted as you have, however, has earned the right to skip “ trying everything” on a marriage that, pardon the grim analogy, is plainly DOA.